Economic Recovery Yields Few Benefits for the Voters Democrats Rely On

WASHINGTON — Signs that a long-awaited economic recovery may finally be gaining steam should be welcome news for President Obama and his party as they try to stem losses in this year’s midterm elections. But rising payrolls, lower unemployment and a buoyed stock market, while lifting the fortunes of the rich, are leaving behind major Democratic constituencies, including young women and blacks, just as the party tries to motivate them to turn out to vote in November.

“There’s a recovery for some people, you know, and other people, not so much,” said James Carville, a Democratic strategist, who likened the current conditions to those in 1994, when Democrats were trounced despite an economy that was clearly in recovery.

Though broad measures of the economy are showing signs of improvement, a closer look at important indicators among individual groups reveals that voting blocs critical to Democrats in recent elections are not yet feeling the benefits.

Consider women, whose unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent, up almost two percentage points from when Mr. Obama took office, as they weighed whether to vote in the midterms of 2010. Today, it is 5.7 percent, a seemingly shining number for Democrats desperate to widen the gender gap.

But while the number of women out of work appears to be much improved, the number of women employed compared with the total female population is 55.2 percent, actually worse than it was in October 2010. Progress, in fact, is a mirage, the product of what economists call the disappearing work force: people giving up and dropping out.

“After all these years, it’s no wonder people are still feeling the weight of the Great Recession,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which tracks the well-being of the poor and the working class, “because the weight is still there.”

Midterm elections tend to be fueled more by mood than by policy, and five years after the recession’s official end, core Democratic constituents might be forgiven for their sour mood or disenchantment with the president.

Voters with family incomes below $30,000 backed Mr. Obama against Mitt Romney 63 percent to 35 percent in 2012, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research. According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in late April, 46 percent of such voters said they would vote for a Democrat running for Congress, versus 43 percent who would vote Republican. Women between the ages of 18 and 49 would back a Democrat over a Republican for Congress 48 percent to 42 percent, much narrower than the gap of 59 percent to 39 percent that Mr. Obama enjoyed.

In contrast, Democratic prospects have improved among those who are better off. Voters with incomes over $100,000 backed Mr. Romney 54 percent to Mr. Obama’s 44 percent in 2012. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in April, voters with incomes over $100,000 would back a Republican over a Democrat for Congress 46 percent to 44 percent.

Even Republicans, usually loath to draw class distinctions, see the dynamic. “People are working harder, but they are being left behind,” said Representative Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican who is running to unseat Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat. “Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer.”

The politics of the economy mirror the economic statistics. In employment prospects, job security and wage growth for all but the most affluent, the recovery remains anemic at best, a difficult selling point for the party that has held both the White House and the Senate for more than five years. Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling firm, advised Democratic candidates to give up hope on the economy and drive home a populist message comparing the fortunes of the top 1 percent with the struggles of everyone else.

“As a start, Democrats should bury any mention of ‘the recovery,’ ” stated an April memo from the group, which includes Mr. Carville and Stanley B. Greenberg, who were two political strategists for Bill Clinton.

The discontent is manifest not in the headline numbers — falling unemployment, rising payrolls, climbing corporate profits that have fueled a healthy stock market — but in numbers deeper in the weeds.

Nearly 6.7 million people reported holding multiple jobs as Americans prepared to vote in 2010. That number now tops more than seven million.

In October 2010, more than 2.57 million said they worked part time because those were the only jobs they could find. In April, 2.62 million said that. Average hourly earnings stood at $18.46 when Mr. Obama took office, $22.73 at the last midterm elections, and $24.31 in April — slow but steady progress, even adjusting that 2009 figure for inflation, to $20.40.

But income growth has been very uneven, said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a research institution closely allied with the president. Income for households in the exact middle of the income distribution declined 4.26 percent from 2009 to 2012, the last year for which data is available. For white households, mean income declined by 2.2 percent. For black homes, the decline was 4.5 percent; for Hispanics, 4.2 percent.

Meanwhile, pretax income for the top 1 percent grew by 31 percent over that same time frame. The other 99 percent saw income growth of 0.4 percent.

An obscure measure of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Jolts (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey), shows that layoffs are no longer the big concern they once were, but the “quits rate,” which measures workers’ willingness to leave a job voluntarily, remains depressed. That indicates people remain fearful of their prospects, unwilling to take risks, and thus unable to get ahead.

Measuring what economists call the employment-population ratio is even more telling — and for Democrats, most disturbing. Blacks, whose support for Mr. Obama has been unwavering, have seen their unemployment rate drop from 15.7 percent at the last midterms to 11.6 percent, still high but a considerable improvement. But the rate at which they are employed has barely moved, to 53.8 percent of the black population from 52.4. Black women have seen no improvement in their employment rate.

Support among black voters for a Democratic congressional candidate stands around 77 percent. It was 93 percent near Election Day 2012.

Hispanics, the bulwark in 2010 that kept the Senate in Democratic hands, have seen their unemployment rate fall nearly in half since then, to 7.3 percent from 12.6 percent. But Hispanic employment has risen just barely, from 58.6 percent to 60.8 percent of the Hispanic population.

Jared Bernstein, a former economist for the Obama White House, put it this way: Since the end of the recession, the gross domestic product has grown 11 percent, the Standard & Poor’s 500 is up 83 percent, corporate profits have swelled 53 percent — and median household income, in the most up-to-date numbers, has fallen 4 percent.

“The broad story is that economic growth is absolutely necessary to help the middle class and poor, but it’s not sufficient,” Mr. Bernstein said. “We’ve been talking about this inequality problem in abstract, but concretely, for any given amount of growth, you’re going to get less in the middle.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Economic Recovery Yields Few Benefits for the Voters Democrats Rely On. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe